1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to error correction systems, and more particularly to the decoding of Reed-Solomon Error Correction Code (R-S ECC) encoded data and the generation of syndromes during the decoding.
2. Description of the Related Art
Traditional syndrome generation employs all the data and parity symbols received from a channel. Typically, syndrome generation requires M multiply operations Galois Field (GF 2.sup.N) (where M is the number of parity symbols for the data block, and N is the number of bits in each data symbol) to generate syndromes for the data and parity symbols received from the channel. Since a GF multiply operation is relatively complex to implement in hardware or software, an improved method and apparatus for generating syndromes that reduces the number of GF multiply operations is desired.
The prior art known to applicants does not disclose nor remotely suggest a method and apparatus for generating syndromes for a Reed-Solomon Error Correction Code (R-S ECC) decoder that employs an encoding step and performs syndrome generation on the parity symbols generated by the encoding step.